At a time when young Britons are questioning their colonial past more than ever, the Unfiltered History Tour is a secret tour of the British Museum’s stolen colonial artefacts, that makes use of a tool the young generation are familiar with - Instagram filters.

When visitors use their smartphones to scan the museum’s stolen artefacts, they hear native experts narrate the true histories of how they were stolen, with native soundscapes from each country, built into the Augmented Reality experience.

While the British Museum’s narrative portrayed the colonies as helpless in the face of British aggression; AR in smartphones were used for the first time ever, to tell history from the perspective of the colonies, as formidable foes who fought to save their cultural treasures from being taken away.

Sergio Mata'u Rapu: There's this really intense feeling when you are sitting under the Moai, watching the sunrise at this site called Tongariki, the largest site on Rapa Nui. It has 15 statues, they're standing on a platform. There are no lights out there, so you get this sort of majestic, starlit sky. The sun will rise kind of behind the statues in the darkness. And then the blue starts appearing and there's sort of these massive black shadows just right in front of you. It really just looks like you're this tiny little kid, amongst these adults; they're having a conversation. From this angle, you're looking up at them kind of up to their chest and up to their nose. And it's very similar to that perspective that you have like, holding your grandmother's hand or your grandfather's hand as you walk alongside them. When you look up and you're a tiny kid. Those are the parts of the faces that you see. And that's what the moai are.

Soundbite: Stolen lives, get it back; stolen culture, give it back. VICE World News presents The Unfiltered History Tour – colonialism, as told through 10 objects.

Mata'u Rapu: My name is Sergio Mata'u Rapu. I'm a filmmaker. I was born and am from a tiny little speck in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Today it's known as Easter Island. We as a native people call it Rapa Nui. It is about a five hour plane flight from Santiago, Chile. It's five hours from Papeete in Tahiti. Growing up, I could always identify it because they would put the legend of a map. Sometimes right next to it, if not right on top of it. Like that's how insignificant we were to mapmakers, right? We as Rapa Nui descend from Polynesians. So a long, long time ago, between 1800 AD and 1200, my ancestors landed on this tiny little island and settled it. We are descendants of the ancient statue carvers that built all of these statues. You know, oftentimes, there's a narrative that it's a mystery of who built them and why and honestly, we know that stuff, my ancestors made them.

Tarita Alarcón Rapu: What we found when we arrived to Rapa Nui, we found rocks, many rocks that are plenty till today. My name is Tarita Rapu, descendent of Hoa Hakananai'a. One day they start to develop – my ancestors start to develop, they start to increase and develop the construction of huge moai or “living faces”, as we call it here.

Mata'u Rapu: The traditional name is aringa ora ata te puna which translates to the living face of our ancestors.

Alarcón Rapu: And we have more than 900 moais. If you go out from this room, you're going to find a moai, like 20 metres away from you [laughs].

Mata'u Rapu: The moai are pretty massive...

Alarcón Rapu: Three metres to ten metres to 21 metres...

Mata'u Rapu: And they then sit on top of a platform. Go outside, look at a three-storey building and that's kind of how big they are. You know, the reverence of the moai continues to be an important part of Rapa Nui culture today. People spend time in front of them, people regard them as ancestors, we respect them. We get really pissed off when tourists climb up on the platforms or try and carve their names into them, which has happened unfortunately.

Alarcón Rapu: For us, it's not just a well-carved rock. It is a living ancestor. Living.

Mata'u Rapu: There are these two big stages to the history of our island. One is: We make giant statues. Two is: We have the Birdman competition.

Alarcón Rapu: In the south side, you're gonna find one volcano, which name is Rano Raraku. In this volcano, we built an entire village. In that place, you have a house; inside you could find the moai Hoa Hakananai'a.

Mata'u Rapu: So this moai was key to the Birdman ceremony. It was this yearly festival, essentially where each clan of the island sent one, I would say, champion or warrior. And it was this massive triathlon, which involved these warriors climbing down a huge cliff face – probably around 500 feet – down into deep dark waters, shark-infested waters. And then they have to swim out to these little islands that we have. They get to these islands and they're trying to find the egg of the manutara bird – the sooty tern. You swim out there, you find an egg, you swim back, climb back up the cliff face...

Alarcón Rapu: The tribe to get the first egg; they get the power, the political power to rule the island for an entire year till the next competition.

Mata'u Rapu: This whole triathlon was really a social, political way of trying to figure out how to share all our stuff, how to share all the food and the resources of the island. And it came – it started happening after moai construction stopped. What's unique about Hoa Hakananai'a is that this is a moai from this older time participating in the rituals and ceremonies of the modern time.

Alarcón Rapu: Hoa Hakananai'a, the most perfect tupuna or “ancestor”, living tupuna with the power or mana, we call it mana. Hoa Hakanana, because of his power, his mana, we get reunite again in peace.

Mata'u Rapu: And you can even see it on the back of the statue. There are these carvings that are emblematic of the Birdman competition; of a new way of thought...

Alarcón Rapu: It’s the only moai that you found a complete alphabet of the Rapa Nui history. You can find the fertility; you can find the rainbow; you can found the rain; you can find the feminine and masculine together. There are an entire language in his back.

Mata'u Rapu: The West made contact with Rapa Nui in 1722. Basically a Dutch explorer that was sailing around the Pacific and happened to like, bump into our island on Easter Sunday. And so hence, as things go, we became Easter Island. A few years later, in 1774, the British explorer James Cook actually arrives. But really, like the point of Hoa Hakananai'a is this statue was taken off of the island in 1868 by some other British explorers from the ceremonial site. And he wasn't just kind of like, out in the open. Like, the statue was buried somewhat underground within one of these ceremonial houses. So, in fact, the crew of the British vessel had to take apart the house in order to remove this statue. And now this very important statue is on display in a museum thousands of miles away from the people who actually used it and carved it. I would say the saddest part of it all, is that very few Rapa Nui have actually been able to see him.

Alarcón Rapu: I get to this position of governor of Rapa Nui. I was leading the cultural campaign to ask the British Museum authorities to have Hoa Hakananai'a back. We asked to the Chilean government to help us politically to be heard at the British Museum to make contact with the authorities. We arrived to the museum that 20 of November 2018 in the morning, they give us a special time to meet Hoa Hakananai'a. We get to the museum – we didn't want no other place, we don't want to go to visit no castle, no other monument. We get to England, we close our eyes and sleep, in the morning we just open it to see Hoa Hakananai'a – that’s the only thing we do there. The emotion we let it come out. In that moment, when I saw him, I could feel it. And I started to sing an old song, which is a song for tupunas who are away – to talk to him and say... [begins singing]

Mata'u Rapu: In the most recent years, there's been kind of a resurgence culturally, for many groups of Rapa Nui to ask for artefacts back.

Alarcón Rapu: We invite the authorities of the museum to come and visit Rapa Nui and see Rapa Nui people, Rapa Nui children, how the Rapa Nui children compose and made songs for Hoa Hakananai'a, how they draw in the school Hoa Hakananai'a, how they dream about Hoa Hakananai'a. We start to work in this memorandum of understanding, which includes three points. One point is we can send some young Rapa Nui students to be prepared in curatorial or things like that at the British Museum. The second point is we can exchange artistic activities from England to Rapa Nui and Rapa Nui to England. And the third, the Rapa Nui people can carve a special moai just for the people of London, to be the ambassador. That's the three main points of the memorandum of understanding that we are waiting to have. Nearly [laughs] so nearly.

Rapa Nui people is Hoa Hakananai'a, and Hoa Hakananai'a is Rapa Nui people, together.

Mata'u Rapu: Rapa Nui history isn't completely clear. And that has to do a lot with the fact that soon after contact with the West, a lot of our population experienced things that you know, really other native populations experience. That there were a bunch of introduced diseases that came in, there were slave raids that happened on our island. Our community was decimated. People who were either enslaved or died down to about 111 people. Traditionally, we would pass down our history orally, right, we were a oral culture. And then now all of a sudden, you have this short period of time when a massive amount of people either die or get taken. And that chain of information just gets cut off.

I think of a cousin of mine, he was an amazing carver. He would make sort of wooden replicas of a lot of, you know, important objects of our culture. He learned that I lived in the US and kind of all of this stuff. And he said, “Hey, can you get me a copy of this book by [Norwegian ethnographer] Thor Heyerdahl – it has some photos of some of these objects? I'd really love to carve them.” Immediately, I said yes. But there was a sinking feeling of like, here's a master carver on Rapa Nui, who wants to learn about his past by physically creating these objects that his ancestors carved. It's not even that like, he can just go to a museum and see it. He needs to ask for a photo book that is out of print of some other white guy that took pictures of it in order to create the thing.

Alarcón Rapu: In simple words, Rapa Nui have the body but you have the soul. We walk through this world without our soul. That's an empty body. [sings] When you get access to the museum, if you make him hear this song, please, it will be appreciated. So he can feel warm again. So make him listen this song, por favor. Please.

Credits: This podcast was produced by Jesse Lawson, with research from Marthe Van Der Wolf. This episode features original singing from Tarita Rapu, and sounds from BP or not BP. The Unfiltered History Tour is a VICE UK production.

The British Museum’s artefacts might be objects for its visitors, however, they hold deep cultural and religious significance for the communities they belong to.

While the Hoa Hakananai’a is popularly known as the ‘Easter Island head’, He holds deep religious signifiance to the people of Rapa Nui who worship Him as a living God. Similarly, while the Amaravati Marbles are admired for their marble craftsmanship, they originally formed the Amaravati Stupa (dismantled and torn down by the British), Asia’s second largest at the time

Each audio uncovers the cultural significance and manner of looting of each artefact; the Chinese Summer Palace Jades faced a similar fate as the Benin Bronzes, cultural treasures that were looted by British soldiers after massacres by the British Army. These facts are unknown to most young Britons, as the British Museum never reveals how these artefacts were acquired in the first place.